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Thursday, January 10, 2013

Get the electronic version of "So Dad, What Makes a Man?" at your favorite vendor

Masculine versus
Feminine

I invite you to try this with someone you know:Give them a quarter, a dime and a nickel.Ask them to compare the coins, then listen to
whether they first say how the coins are different, or, alike, or, some
combination of both.

There is no correct answer, only evidence that as
individuals we make different initial judgments about the same information. I
once thrived on people's differences by rejecting people who
believed differently than me--sometimes on a single issue. An old Webster's College
Dictionary defines unreasonable feelings, emotions, and opinions of a hostile
nature regarding national, racial or religious groups as "prejudice."
These days prejudice seems quite fashionable. It certainly was for me when I was young.

The trendy refusal to ignore other people's similarities is
like not noticing that those coins in the above comparison are all money, all
roundandmade of metal, and all marked with "The United States of
America," "E PLURIBUS UNUM," "Liberty" and "In
God We Trust."

In the introduction to So
Dad, What Makes a Man? I say some of the country's male political leaders
disappoint me, right before admitting I spent my first half of life following
the footsteps of my father, who was very comfortable with polarization. He and
I were convinced of the rightness of our opinions.

Differences were important then because they manifested
competition--by differentiating my college classmates by grade point, my military
enemies by uniform, my corporate status and my company's products by performance. In
all of those, from college beginning in 1962 through my corporate life ending
in 1991, my only competitors were men.

To be successful among men, my father taught me to be competitive,
aggressive, logical, cool-headed and ambitious. . . pretty much the opposite of
how he viewed women: emotional, accepting, care-givers, submissive, and
nurturing. Yet when my midlife crisis arrived, what I most desired was to know
who I was, and, to have better relationships and a spiritual life. I have worked on that since by exploring the qualities
within me that Dad had assigned only to women. My accomplishments differentiate me
from men, while sharing a common emotion unites us. For example, revealing our grief
following the senseless murders in Newtown, Connecticut.

The more I explore my inner life the more its complexity fascinates
me--from learning my preference of similarities in initial comparisons from the
coin game, to finding that others don't cause my anger and I don't cause
theirs. My mind is the most intriguing, where thought processes take place
among billions of neurons that have trillions of connections.

My father used to warn me not to listen to other people's
opinions because they would "mess with my mind." Dr. Lee Roy Beach in
The Psychology of Narrative Thought: How
the Stories We Tell Ourselves Shape Our Lives, (2010) says as a social
creature, I listen to those around me, and from what I hear, whether a political
ad or my best friend, I constantly revise how the world works, what has
happened, and what might happen. Either I accept what I hear unquestioningly,
or reject it, or accept it provisionally or in part.My reality
is my truth. That ishow Imake sense of things.

So my challenge to relate better to God and others and to know
myself, is to better understand my memories, perceptions, imagination and
decision making. Decisions that I make involve my feelings and emotions and are
value judgments, i.e., choices that reveal more about my values, fears and memories
than about the reality of what is. My spiritual growth also depends on
awareness and knowledge of my emotions.Without
these, I cannot practice, for example, St. Ignatius's Examen, that he considered
the bedrock of Jesuit men's growth.

Some women I know who are crossing over from their "traditional"
characteristics give me courage to do likewise, by exploring characteristics
within me my father found feminine.